Steve,

Like you, I run a one-man shop and started with DOS in the '80s. I eschewed WordStar and used MultiMate, then Wordperfect, and finally Word (unwillingly). That said, the normal style's font is determined by the body font set in the theme unless a different font is set in the normal style's definition.

(Body text) means the font set in the theme.
"Default paragraph font" means the font set in the underlying paragraph style. I do not think that "default" in this means that in this case, though. The normal style is the default for most purposes.

I would recommend using themes if you are starting out from scratch. It allows you to make global changes if you change your mind. (I do not use them because I am satisfied with the documents I set up before themes came out (i.e., in Word 97). And, I'm lazy.)

If you are using Word exclusively now, and using it more than a couple of hours a week, you NEED to learn about styles. What follows is me quoting me. (I'm old, I get to do that!)

"For shorter one-use documents, direct formatting is OK; you'll only regret not using styles about one time in six, on the other five out of the six, you'll save a bit of time.

"If you create document templates with direct formatting, you deserve what will happen to you when someone finds out (and it won't be nice). In my opinion, using direct formatting in document templates intended for use by others rates the words malicious and/or incompetent. If the templates are for your own use, you deserve the loss of days, months, even years from your life that you'll spend fighting with Word and trying to figure out why your documents look so bad.

"Trying to use Word without understanding and using styles is like pushing on a string. I resisted learning and using styles for years and now regret every day of those years because although that string was still very hard to push, it kept getting longer and longer, and had some very important projects tied to it! Once you understand styles and the Word concept of organizing things into Chinese boxes everything falls into place and instead of pushing a string, you can push a button that turns on the very powerful text processing machine known as Microsoft Word and it will start doing your work for you instead of running around behind you trying to undo what you thought you just did."


If you use Word 10 hours or more a week, you'll recover the time you spend reading (slogging through) those links in a month or less. You only need the one on numbering if you are trying to automatically number things in your documents. If you are, you need that one, as well.